[Gllug] attached files merged into text file

[John Winters]

Diana Scott wrote:
> A client of mine has an email with the company name.co.uk and any
> incoming email with the attaching files will forward to his personal
> email address. However, the content of the email message and the
> attaching files such as .doc or .pdf have also translated into a large
> block of random characters and merged into a text file called "noname".
> 
> An example of the word document has turned into code in the mail text
> file is as follows:
> 
> ------=_NextPart_000_001E_01C99120.A95523C0
> Content-Type: application/msword;
> 	name="flyer - Carers Art Therapy Group.doc"
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
> Content-Disposition: attachment;
> 	filename="flyer - Carers Art Therapy Group.doc"
> 
> 0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAATAAAAAAAAAAA
[snip]
> 
> 
> I have reported it to the service provider but they denied any
> responsibility. Do you know which part has gone wrong and ,more
> importantly, how to ratify the situation?

How to ratify the situation?!  You mean he likes it like that?

Seriously though - this is how attachments work.  An e-mail is just a
large wodge of text.  If you want to attach a file to an e-mail it's
embedded as "a large block of random characters" and then it's the job
of the recipient's e-mail reading program to strip it out again.

Take any e-mail with an attachment and choose your e-mail client's "view
source" option and you'll see it for yourself.  As for what's going
wrong in this case it could be one of two things.  Either the forwarding
component is corrupting the e-mail in some way (unlikely) or the program
which he uses to read his e-mail is broken.

You don't say how he finally reads the e-mail.  Is it a local
application or a webmail interface?  Can you provide the full text
(including headers) of a test e-mail with a small attachment?

Cheers,
John
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